Rents in Austin are going down, so why are eviction filings up?

Yahoo

26-03-2025

Austin-area rents might have fallen recently, but the number of evictions filed by landlords has continued to rise.
That's according to a recent report by tenants rights group BASTA, which found that eviction filings increased 36% last year in Travis County, to 13,210. That is the most eviction filings recorded in the past 10 years.
The report comes as rents have continued to decline in the Austin region since a 2022 peak, a trend experts say is the result of a surge in the number of new apartment units coming online and a slight slowdown in Austin's population boom.
Advocates and landlords disagree about why exactly eviction filings have continued on an upward trajectory despite lower rents.
The authors of the BASTA report attribute the increase to a persistent affordability crisis for the region's lowest-income residents, asserting that rents have not decreased sufficiently to help the region's poorest make ends meet.
'The narrative that rents are falling everywhere, like a renter's paradise, has been all over the place in the media,' BASTA project director Shoshana Krieger said. 'But if you said that to a low-income tenant, they would not necessarily feel that is their reality.'
Krieger said she is concerned by the stiff competition for the most affordable units, and the willingness of some area landlords to file evictions as a way to scare delinquent tenants into paying up. The BASTA report highlights 10 apartment properties that filed an outsized share of evictions.
Filings are just a first step in the eviction process and do not always lead to judgments against tenants. BASTA's evictions dashboard shows that almost exactly half of the more than 96,000 evictions filed since January 2014 in Travis County resulted in a judgment.
Austin's landlords have a different explanation for the ongoing rise in eviction filings.
Emily Blair, vice president of the trade group that represents the city's property owners and managers, said that filings are still on the rise in part because there are simply more units on the market. But she also acknowledged that an end to government relief programs and increased household costs due to inflation have played a role.
'Our industry really is committed to helping keep residents housed,' Blair said. 'Evictions are difficult and aren't undertaken lightly.'
Austin added approximately 26,000 new rental units last year, according to an assessment by Austin Investor Interests, a real estate analytics company.
That increase drove down rental prices, the firm's founder, Robin Davis, said in an interview.
In mid-2022, Davis said average rent peaked at about $1,742 per month. By late last year, it had fallen to about $1,400. But she noted that is still slightly higher than it was during the first quarter of 2021 – $1,332 per month – when a pandemic-driven population growth bubble began in the area.
Combined with slow job growth and more stagnant wages, she said current rent prices might still be a burden for lower-income residents.
'That's kind of what we're facing — how low do they have to go to where evictions stop?' Davis said.
BASTA says the problem could be addressed through rental assistance programs, prevention plans and other mediation efforts. That would not only reduce eviction judgments, it says, but also limit damage to tenants' credit scores and housing histories and reduce court caseloads. Krieger said it's up to the government and landlords to fund such efforts.
The outlook on the government front is grim, said HousingWorks Austin Director Awais Azhar said. With the Trump administration moving to scale back all types of federal spending, including on affordable housing programs, the onus will fall squarely on the city, which has far less money to work with.
'The city of Austin cannot individually solve all eviction problems,' Azhar said. 'We cannot do this by ourselves.'
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Rents in Austin are going down, so why are eviction filings up?